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Spencer
Dew begins his short story collection, Songs of Insurgency,
with a conversation between a guy and a phone sex operator
who opens the session by talking about the storm that just
rolled in. Dew uses this interlude to tell us everything we
need to know about the girl, her job, and the bored guy who
called her: She has to go to a call center that provides scripts
and antibacterial wipes; her voice is tired; she's in California.
"That image, plus the way she relays it, her sense of wonder,
her weary voice, makes me sad in a way I can't put into words.
And so, instead, I tell her to describe what it would look
like, her sucking my cock."
Dew's
minimalist writing manages to say clearly more than the words
on the page—the real story is written between the lines.
As with much minimalist writing, Dew's stories evoke a feeling
more than a plot. Readers are left uneasy or sad or a little
hopeful. Dew says more in two or three pages than some authors
say in 20.
Many
readers will identify with characters who talk circles around
the real issues at hand—it's not surprising that a man
would have a breakdown when being interviewed for jury selection,
sobbing about injustice when he's been avoiding dealing with
his wife's cervical cancer and infidelity, as happens in "Cervical
Days." But Dew's characters are very self-aware. They almost
always come around to admitting it during crucial moments,
such as when the spouse of the cervical cancer sufferer admits,
"What I mean to say is this: I was scared because you were
told you had cancer. …I got scared because for some reason
which I still can't come up with words for I was just too
terrified to eat your pussy, as if you had gone contagious,
or maybe even as if the whole thing with your cervix was some
sign of where we were, you and I, as a couple, a year out
of college and idiotic and high, with only a couple of unexamined
dreams and no plans or skills or guts or clue."
Songs
is about sex, death, and disconnect and the huge spaces between
us; even when people speak, things are left unsaid and misinterpreted.
"The Heart of It All" starts with, "Kim tells me that these
days she's just wild about cilantro, and that since August,
she's suspected everyone of being a suicide bomber." This
story, about a survivor of the attacks on September 11, 2001
who goes home to Ohio, takes place at a Halloween wedding
where the guests have come in costume, where Jesus lectures
on redemption themes in superhero comic books, and where a
blue M&M states that every action is a political action. Even
the pop of the champagne is construed as a possible terrorist
threat. The situations are terrible, offset with absurdities
like cooking magazine advice, but Dew always brings readers
back to the ineffable sadness felt by the characters.
"After
Art School" is a devastating critique of the deconstructionist
tendencies of people trained to take apart but not put together
and who see the potential for artistic projects in everything
but avoid real life. It begins with a couple analyzing the
pornography they're watching. "Layers in layers, you say,
like who really wears a jacket for a blowjob, let alone one
so languorous, so fucking meta, thick with intertext?" Later,
"(b)y dinner we are out of theory, picking reproduction gristle
out of our faux hot dogs, a bit of bone made out of water
chestnut, celery veins. The sink clogs, and it gives you the
hint of an idea, draining as a theme, bottles of liquid paper,
pure white."
The saddest
and bitterest of the bunch is "After Constantina," taking
place during a time of an unnamed war when suicide is romanticized
and glamorized. Slip dresses with faux-cuts and bruises are
popular, so even the non-morose can pretend to be suicidal.
"I felt, for months, that melodrama was the new black. Everyone
approximated depths of suffering." During the course of the
story the reader realizes that an apocalyptic tragedy has
taken place in America. Dew drops tiny clues like "People
felt bad about Los Angeles," and "[t]hen came the real walls,
the conversion of the intake cribs, offshore, to prison facilities."
The people
in Songs are languid and resigned, trying to make the
best of what they see as a tragically unfixable world. Dew's
voice is the voice of the dissatisfied American intellectual
who is still too complacent and depressed to do much except
eat, drink, and fuck.
The stories
read slowly, and each word hangs in the air, resonating with
sound, as if Dew is relating a bad dream on a hangover morning.
Don't be fooled by the small page count—readers will
not speed through this book. These three- to ten-page stories
are meant to be savored like bitter chocolate.
(May,
2008)
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